the comfort

It’s hard for me to wrap my heard around being gone. The essence of it all, whether its enormously enthralling or the slightest of smalls. “I’m sorry for your loss.” It comes in waves, the understanding of the word, “loss.” But where do they go? What does it mean when i see the picture, stare at it for hours trying to remember what it was like when they were right here in front of me always knowing that they never will be again?

Is there a reference code of reminding my inner child to never give up the moments that were so pure and full of light. The simmering of supper around dinner time and the way the room smelled of love and fullness. How your voice was a sort of jolly like substance that enamored my ears into a clear understanding that no matter what, everything was really alright. Because how could it ever be anything else?

I look outside to just close my eyes and try to recall how it all happened. How your life crossed within my own and now mine continues onward as yours fades away into the stardust. Until the ether where then you disperse yourself into the sky, the universe. Or maybe the hummingbird that zooms around my flowers now is a part of you. The essence of you to ensure that despite my aching heart and the heaviness that comes when I remember you saying my name, that you come by every so often to make sure I’m some sort of okay.

I imagine you laughing wherever you are. Laughing with a joy contained only by the sun and small children when they giggle and play knowing there’s nothing they fear. Because life hasn’t really gotten to them yet. The monsters under their beds are still just imaginary blobs of mass that within the years to come will finally take on the faces of the humans around them. Sometimes the ones closest to them.

I can hear your laugh and the way you would eat so slow. Food hanging on to your chin as if it was the last chance of survival. You would stare off into the kitchen table as it reflected the fluorescence of the light above and nod into the conversation to the parts you liked, and then make a humming noise for the parts you liked even more. I find myself nodding from time to time, just to feel what you felt all those years, and to maybe hold on to one last piece of you before they all flutter away.

But could it be so selfish to please ask of you to stay a little longer? Small hints of you here and there to just remind me that you never really left? That you’re just off somewhere and we will see each other soon. And it’s just a bit more time before I open the door and you slowly walk in with a smile going on mid conversation of things i know nothing about and ultimately never will.

And that alone is the comfort.

The Seasons

September came quickly once she was taken away with the summer wind and I was left with the dust and settling of suicidal leaves by my feet. Like a song from long ago, everything she’d ever said, sung around my head but only every other word I could remember. “My winter, my wind, welcome loneliness home again.” I hummed dramatically as I placed my hand over my heart and tried to make it stop beating with my mind. It didn’t work.

The heavy paced city moved around me, reinforcing the irrelevancy I already felt not worthy of. Do we not feel heartbreak as if its the first time, every time it blows across our souls? “Oh, but please baby please, don’t let me go.” I sang softly as I walked against the wind and up towards the hill while the dead leaves leached on to my feet as the fall sky fell into the dark night and winter took over the world. She kept away. She kept deep down into her own world that I was no longer apart of. But isn’t that just it? Isn’t that how it goes? “So it goes, never so low, so long to the hero,” Played from a radio as I walked around the library in the main part of town pretending to look for something I knew I’d never find. The bright lights and pine drenched over everything. I was after her, but all I could find was her ghost.

“Tell me something you’ve never told anyone.” She asked cuddling her body tighter onto the chair, bringing her knees up to her chest. “I think Linda is the ugliest name ever invented,” I said as I caressed her forearm, feeling the tiny hairs against my fingertips as I misread every word in front of me, unable to concentrate. “Isn’t that your mom’s name?” She gasped laughing, tilting her head back laughing so hard that I thought she was going to fall off the old library chair that made a squeak every time she moved her body to a more comfortable position. “That’s why I never told anyone,” I said smirking, pretending to be so cool. I pretended to be so deep into those words I couldn’t read because all I could do was think of the excitement that filled my soul knowing that the next time I looked up I would see her there smiling in front of me.

“and the worst kind aren’t the ones who spell it, L I N D A, no no,” I said closing the book slowly, and repositioning my body closer to her as I spilled out my secret carefully by her ear, “no, no, it’s the ones who spell it L Y N D A.” I shook my head in disappointment as she smiled again moving her head closer into my space. She paused for a moment and turned her head slightly to the right thinking about this. “Wait, isn’t your moms named Lynda, spelled with a Y.” I shook my head slowly with my eyes closed as if I was about to receive a blow to the chin. She began to laugh again and this time the soft giggles turned into a roaring rebuttal to the thing I had never told anyone before. She pulled me in closer, so close that I could smell her perfume, her skin, I could smell the way she spoke and the way she felt about it. “Don’t you worry my sweet. Your secret is safe with me,” She pulled me closer and kissed my lips.

I walked around the library enough times to memorize the sections and started to feel saddened but the unnecessary amount of books that were in the library considering how electronic books have taken away the need for libraries. I shook my head and jammed my hands in my pockets as I walked out into the freezing cold. She hated those electronic books, those tablets.

“I can’t believe we’ve come to this.” She said shaking her head as her forehead tightened and her lips pursed together. “I can’t believe we’ve progressed to the point of losing ourselves in the process.” She would take out a book from the shelf and touch it so intimately that I would feel a jealous jab run through me. I wanted to be the book, extend my skin across its cover and bend myself in-between the binding.

Maybe that was it. Maybe I just wanted too much. Maybe she got sick of feeling my wanting instead of receiving my giving. Or maybe I took so much from her that she had nothing left for herself. Towards the end, her once warm embrace had vanished leaving behind a cold, unrecognizable environment. We stopped going to the library.

“We’ve been there so many times,” she would say, “Why don’t we go somewhere else for a change?” Somewhere else? I couldn’t think of anywhere else that meant so much, that felt so sacred and special between us both. Then the letters kept coming in. The ones who welcomed her to places far from where we stood and the more that came, the farther away she began to feel. “We have to talk about this, we can’t pretend like summer isn’t ending.” She said so quickly as if she’d just ran a mile and had no breath left to spare. Her mind was elsewhere, her mind was anywhere but where we were as we sat on the banking looking out at the river decorated with bodies in bathing suits splashing one another in the humid city heat.

The funny thing about conversing with your heart is that sometimes the words just don’t come fast enough. That sometimes you are sitting there hearing and watching lips deliver sounds that mean something to you, but you can’t think of anything in the world to say back. Because there are no words. There is nothing that can be said to convey an ending to a beginning of the first time you felt a love so pure and endless that once she tells you it's over and she’s leaving, no sound or language or movement could express the missing you feel. The missing you will endure indefinitely.

The spring is calling now, the birds can’t shut up about it every morning as I stretch my body across my empty bed and cling to the only one of her hairs left on my pillowcase and cry until I feel void of feeling anything at all. It gets easier, they say. That time steals away your memories and the emotions attached to the lacking of her isn’t missing, its just a distant memory from a person you used to know long ago. I scratch my arm as I stare out at the bright earth and smell the flowers. The grass is soft and green under my feet, tickling the back of my neck as I lay down staring up at the vacant blue sky. “I wish you bluebirds in the spring..” I start to sing and finally give in to the silence that is you gone.

The Potterice

(I know that's not a word, but a female poet is called a "Poetrice," so why can't a female potter be called a potterice? Thus I have decided to invent The Potterice.) 

 We were in high school in a town that was surrounded by lots of trees and big shuttered houses with too much money inside, winters that were very cold and driveways that were always shoveled. I never really felt a connection to anyone at this point in life except maybe a female friend from church who was quick to remind me that, "Homosexuality is a sin, “ so that was a very short-lived crush. I can tell you that; Not to mention quite the love buzz kill. I never knew what it meant to be in love. I saw the others with boyfriends holding hands at the football game and grinding on each other's legs during the Middle School socials. Heck, I even got in on some of the grinding action, which I now know was the need to feel wanted and not out of feeling happy to have a sweaty seventh-grader grind on your leg. All the girls liked all the boys so much, but I always had to force it. There was never anyone or any feeling that grabbed me by my toes and swung me up and down until butterflies swirled around, and smiling was the only option for a facial expression. I wanted to feel love and know what it was. 

   It all started in art class. She was older than me, and I was new to how the whole, "fresh-meat-freshman," thing worked. I didn't realize anything at first. Such as the rules of the hallway, how to use the bathroom pass, how to open my locker. That I could be so enamored by another female classmate. When I first started watching her, it was all so innocent and more for observing. Because I wanted to be very good, better than everyone else, and she was the best at making pottery. I would watch her hands glide in and out of the wet clay, trying to understand how she was able to make such beautiful pieces of functionality and purpose. She could make plates, vases, bowls, a lampshade, coasters. Really she could make anything out of clay.

 I was invited to sit with her and some of the older girls who were sweet and sincere and didn't mean any harm when they said things. (Which I'm sure you understand is confusing if you grew up with passive and cruel girls who would say a compliment but mean it as an insult. Then they would gang up on you and talk about you behind your back for the next eight years of your teenaged life. Which then would follow you for the rest of your life and cause you much emotional damage. I think I'm projecting again.) 

 I was quiet at the beginning of those days. Trying to understand myself, the emotions that would spurt up out of nowhere, not having any reason as to why they were there.

"Hey! It's Extra Sensitivity again! I was really bored and just wanted to crash whatever party this was during your fourth-period class to say what's up! And remind you that the tone your math teacher uses is really mean and you should make your eyes water and maybe cry! Ok, that's all for now. Bye!"

 The art class turned into my haven, a place and moment of comfort and joy. The girls were always so softhearted. So nurturing. Some were seniors, some juniors. I was the youngest out of all of them. I would listen to their banter and laugh effortlessly at their jokes. They were so smart and witty. We spoke the same sense of humor. Once I felt comfortable, I would comment here, add in a tiny sentence there. The craziest thing is that they listened to me. They wanted to hear what I had to say and thought it was funny. Yes, art class became my favorite part of the day.

   All the girls were so kind, yes, but she was different. There was something so different and frightening yet familiar about her all at the same time. I would panic as soon as I heard her voice or saw her sitting there at the table, putting on her apron. A slight redness would make itself known on my chest, something that I soon explained was a "clay allergy." The days blended into weeks, and before I knew what was happening, I would watch her hands covered in the red wetness of the clay, and something began to warm within. It was a feeling I hadn't entirely understood or felt before. Her hands were not just showing me how to make a mug, but they were igniting a fire all over my skin. 

"No, no," she would say laughing kindly, as my hands would run amuck within the muck and result in my small bowl flopping inwards until I was left with a large clump that kind of looked more like poop than anything else. 

"This is how you do it." She said and sat next to me, almost behind me, sort of like the scene from Ghost, but inside of a worn-down high school art classroom without the music and sexy lighting. 

 Her hands slowly slid on top of my own as she guided the correct rhythm needed to create a clay masterpiece she had done so many times before. At this moment, I could feel her breaths against the back of my neck and the trueness of her heart beating somewhere near my back. I tried so hard to concentrate and follow her hands, hear her instructions to transform my piece of clay poop into a practical piece of clay art. Yet all I wanted was to bring her hands towards my chest and wrap her arms around me. I wanted to be every piece of clay she'd ever touched, and transform myself into the redness and wetness she handled every class. 

"See you are getting the hang of it!" She smiled with pride and returned to her clay station as I sat for the next few minutes staring at the swirling goo in front of me, imagining that it was her heart. And as I handled it with the utmost care, my jumbled lump became a somewhat operative bowl-like mug thing that would fantastically forever symbolize the first time I fell in love. 

Hi.

I was going to start this all differently, and describe how I look and what I like, but I guess there's no point in going into the details of my physical preferential irrelevance. Unless you want to know what I look like? My favorite color? Do you? Does it matter? What if I start telling you and it ruins what you thought I was going to look like. How can I ruin this all before we even get started? Although I am taller than the average female. Not super tall but definitely not 5'5 or even 5'8. A little more give or take a few inches. My legs are long, and I always have thought my thighs were too big, even after losing weight. And my stomach for that matter. Fuck it, my whole body. I've always felt I was too big. It started around when I was ten. Or maybe nine? Jesus remembering numbers is getting more difficult as time goes by. But yes, back to my self-shaming body hating ways. That's called body dysmorphia, apparently? It's nice knowing that I'm not the only one that feels this way, but it still doesn't take away the fact that I still feel the same way regardless of knowing that there is a name for it. Anyways let's not get off track.

  It was about seven years ago… or eight when I moved here? But who is really counting when your life flashes before your eyes and your heart breaks in your hands and then all of a sudden you have been away from your family and friends and home for ten years and all you have to show for it is the slight understanding of what body dysmorphia means and knowing the differences of going West on Sunset Blvd. and East on Lincoln. That last part is a lie. I still have no fucking clue which way to turn when some dickhead says, "Go West on Sunset." Hello Sir, does it look like I drive with a fucking compass? Anyways.

 I always knew I wanted to leave home. I always loved traveling. I always knew I couldn't stay put for more than too long. That is still the hardest part, isn't it? Knowing you will never stay where you are but always wanting to go back to where you were. I ended up all over. I was in the suburbs surrendering to a first love, and the confusing feelings of trying to understand those feelings and myself. I found passion and adventure in the world of Bohemians and baguettes living in France. There was the South for a few miserable, yet enjoyable summers as I managed to dodge the Bible thumpers and learn to love country music. (Yeehaw). I had a brief stint in NYC and that very long island with many, many diners, and then I ended up here. In La La Land, where every day feels like a month and years feel like decades of self-loathing and failures, although I may be projecting. 

  But where to start with all of these stories? Does one start at the end in order to begin? Or must we travel through the dusted decades of before for you to truly understand how I got here now? Or maybe we can just jump all over into the mad beauty of life. It's always good to keep steady on your toes. Because you really never know what life will through at you next. All I know is that I have a story to tell, and maybe you will want to read it. Because maybe my story is yours. And maybe my pain and experiences weren’t just wasted time and heartache, but a wondrous woven web of beauty that connects us all together. And isn't that such a reassuring thing to think about? So, here goes nothing!